GOLDRUSH "Ozona" CD/LP. This is Goldrush; five young men from Oxford, England crafting songs of strength and heartbreak (and other matters). They run their own label (Truck Records); they organise their own festival (The Truck Festival - 3 000 people down on the farm every July); and write songs with inspiration far from the current climate: Legends like Neil Young, Nick Drake and The Band, and more recent American innovators like Grandaddy and Mercury Rev. Their willful independence demonstrates there is still a viable underground scene. This is their story:

Here's the situation. An overheating tour van in the middle of miles and miles of empty desert on a hotter-than-sin morning. You'd be praying too.

Through the shimmering heat and plume of steam that rose up from the engine, the gas station looked like a mirage. Goldrush prayed to God, Buddha and L. Ron Hubbard that it wasn't, because if it was - lost on a backroad in a desert - they were dead. They'd be seeing God, or Buddha or L Ron in person very soon.

It was real. It was Ozona, Texas - a long, long way from Oxford, England, where the Bennett brothers and their friends first started blazing a trail back in 2001. But this is Goldrush we're talking about here: resourceful and self-sufficient. Instead of chasing after record labels they started their own (Truck Records). Instead of paying big bucks for studios they built their own (Truck Studio). Instead of traipsing around the corporate-sponsored festival circuit they started their own (Truck Festival).

Ozona was a strip of storefronts: post office, bus station, truck stop. With the wind behind them they could have spit across it. But it did have a truck stop, and a truck stop had beer, and for Goldrush that made this little shithole just as big as it needed to be.

One beer and bourbon-soaked day and night later and they were changed forever. The polished politeness of 2002's debut �Don't Bring Me Down' was gone; in its place a more rough-hewn and organic sound emerged. Goldrush had found their inner Crazy Horse right there in Texas. Not long afterwards they even found their very own Neil Young in the form of former Ride singer/guitarist Mark Gardener, whom they backed to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

But who, they wondered, would help them tell this tale? Rob Campanella, who had worked with their friends from the West Coast The Tyde and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Dave Fridmann, who had been told about Goldrush's greatness by their one-time touring partners The Flaming Lips. The end result is the ragged, heartworn, dusty-eyed sound of �Ozona', named for that tiny town in Texas.

When the tour van was finally fixed, there were no goodbyes, no words exchanged. Goldrush pulled away, looking back as Ozona disappeared once again into the heat haze.